FluidFramework VS automerge

Fluid Framework - Microsoft's collaborative development platform

Has anyone tried Microsoft's fluid framework for collaborative editing?

https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework

https://fluidframework.com/

Have you seen FluidFramework? It's open source (MIT): https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework

I think the first product they're building on it is Loop: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-introduces-loop-a-ne...

Full disclosure I work at MSFT and on the fluid framework.

If you are interested in this you may also be interested in the fluid framework, https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework

We use websockets and solve a lot of the state management problem called out here by keeping very little state on the server itself. The primary thing on server is a monotonically increasing integer we use to stamp messages, this gives us total order broadcast which we then build upon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_broadcast

Here are some code pointers if you want to take a look:

The map package is a decent place to look for how we leverage total order broadcast to keep clients in sync in our distributed data structures:

(Disclosure: Work at Microsoft, but I work in Azure and some open source stuff, not on or directly with Fluid/Office/etc.)

That's just a trademark clause for Microsoft logos and brands. The Fluid Framework itself is [MIT licensed](https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework/blob/main/LICENS...) and doesn't require exposing any of those logos/brands when you use it, so the framework itself is fairly open for usage.

I think the main thing that would slow down adoption for Fluid is that the only "production" backend is an Azure service, which isn't part of the open source Fluid Framework. [Other open source backends](https://fluidframework.com/docs/deployment/service-options/) aren't recommended for productions. Until there are some open source ones, I'd assume adoption will be limited to folks in the Azure ecosystem.

Within the context of the Microsoft-verse, Fluid Framework (https://fluidframework.com) is supposed to be solving similar problems in web apps, although I haven't personally played with it.

Of course, you don’t have to code this functionality from scratch! You can also look at open-source software like Yjs, text-crdt, Automerge and so many more. Alternatively, you can check out tools like Liveblocks, Ably, etc. which enable collaborative multi-player features.

I'm not aware of any usable CRDT implementations for Dart, my plan is to use the flutter_rust_bridge to make use of automerge v2, which is a full CRDT implementation written in Rust that has the advantage of having a very simple API to work with (basically a key/value store).

Yes. I asked the devs about ideas for this in this ticket and got an interesting response. It's aimed towards server-side handling, but the same ideas apply to local storage as well.

There are a lot of implementations of CRDTs out there. In JavaScript, for instance, we have Y.js (https://github.com/yjs/yjs) and automerge (https://github.com/automerge/automerge). There’s also a Y.js demo (https://demos.yjs.dev/prosemirror/prosemirror.html) that allows you to play around with them and have your own collaborative app running in just a few seconds. All messages are exchange via webRTC and manages the state via CRDTs. This can be a great sandbox to understand how CRDTs work and see.

Anyone unsure of what a CRDT is, this is the perfect intro: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

The two most widely used CRDT implementations (combining JSON like general purpose types and rich text editing types) are:

- Automerge https://github.com/automerge/automerge

- Yjs https://github.com/yjs/yjs